after several days looking back at lost and devastated worlds eg
not the eagle, not 2000AD
(destroyed by the success of 2000AD)
not the beano, not the dandy
(destroyed by the success of viz)
i guess i'm reminded of my attachment/attraction - despite supertuff punXoR roots - to Prog, that musicworld "we" (w.our spiky hair and brutal swift-pop formalism) banished and humiliated, thereby creating a prison for ourselves which we COULD NOT EXCAPE
it's not that 2000AD and viz aren't plainly thousands of times better than their overthrown predecessors, in respect of imaginative input and execution more that their rise destroyed this sense of a curious untended garden in which anything could happen, bcz the owners just didn't have a clue, more that - once the new marketleaders were established in their provable superiority, everything that deviated from the template, however tentatively, cd be sidelined
― mark s (mark s), Sunday, 10 October 2004 10:57 (nineteen years ago) link
(most of what grew in that "curious untended garden" wz self-evidently useless, even to myself-at-13... but there are also tendrils and shoots of paths-not-taken, never to be taken)
― mark s (mark s), Sunday, 10 October 2004 10:58 (nineteen years ago) link
In American comics you often find creators getting wistful about the Lost Land of 50s publishing, with superhero, horror, western, detective, romance etc etc titles abundant (eg. in Watchmen Alan Moore's 'pirate comics' backstory), all of them broadly wiped out by the superhero in the 60s - DESPITE comics since the diversity-era generally selling LESS!
It's one of the things that's odd about the artform - the way superpredators can appear and basically destroy existing diversity (actually one equivalent is to look at the pop charts of 1961/2 vs 1964/5 when Merseybeat annihilated the 50s eclectiverse) even if that diversity was 'better' (commercially too) for the industry as a whole. It's like some bizarre business strategem - instead of growing the market you radically shrink it until your product defines it.
Another proof of the idea is the way IPC/Fleetway totally failed to ever establish a successful sister title to 2000AD - Eagle was probably as near as they came.
― Tom (Groke), Sunday, 10 October 2004 11:28 (nineteen years ago) link
nineteen years pass...